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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/24368728">find the cost of freedom</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/neverendingdream/pseuds/neverendingdream'>neverendingdream</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>V for Vendetta (2005)</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Epilogue of sorts, Evey-centric, F/M, character study of sorts, speculative fic</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-05-25</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-05-25</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-04 11:06:58</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Teen And Up Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>No Archive Warnings Apply</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>3,543</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/24368728</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/neverendingdream/pseuds/neverendingdream</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>She fries herself eggs-in-baskets. Fewer and fewer nights she wakes up screaming. She sits on her own couch and queues up the Count of Montecristo, and mouths along to every line. She tries not to cry. Perhaps it's not being V, but she likes to think it's better than surviving. It's living, almost.</p><p>(evey, after)</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Evey Hammond &amp; Ruth, Evey Hammond/V</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>4</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>28</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>find the cost of freedom</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>this is over a decade late but I watched the movie last night and fell in love <strike> (it's a movie after my own heart)</strike> and feel that the movie's themes are more relevant than ever given the current pandemic and the state of the US, the UK, and the world</p><p> </p><p>  <strike>honestly this is super self-indulgent though </strike></p>
    </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p> </p><p><em> 'We are all V,' </em> Evey says to Finch, and believes it. She watches the footage of the explosion and the gathered crowd over and over again, engraves the sight of thousands wearing V's mask onto her heart, onto her soul, tells herself it was worth it, that all of it <em> meant </em> something, in the end. She tells herself there couldn't have been a more fitting burial for him, that he was happy, at the end, to love her, to be loved by her, to know his ideals lived on.</p><p>In the days after the fifth, it doesn't make a difference. Evey doesn't leave the Shadow Gallery. She runs fingers over the suit of armor, places a hand on the silent jukebox, curls up on the squashed cushions of the couch, and does her best not to cry. at night, she sits on the edge of the balcony and watches the city below. Cars pass as she breathes the chill air. People go about their lives. From this distance, she thinks, it almost looks like nothing's changed at all.</p><p>The days stretch into a week of the same sort, and she tries not to sleep. She takes to napping around the gallery, on the couch, at the table, anywhere but her bed or his, anywhere where she won't wake from nightmares without the smell of breakfast in the air, without the sound of old music drifting through the air, without the constant reminder that he's gone, and there's nothing she can do to change it, that she may as well have sealed his fate herself.</p><p> </p><p>Finch comes to check in on her. Or at least, he tries. Evey hears him picking his way through the old tube tunnel long before he arrives at the hidden door, hesitates, then knocks. She doesn't answer. He doesn't leave, not for a long ten minutes spent pacing, back and forth and back and forth, the sound echoing, too-loud in the too-quiet gallery. She likes to think they can hear it, all the way down to where the workers clear the remains of Parliament. Ten minutes, and he's gone, only a carefully wrapped package on the ground in front of the door indicating he was ever there at all. She waits another ten minutes before going to get it, giving it a careful, suspicious once over before bringing it inside, the only new thing to enter the gallery since, well, herself.</p><p>She unwraps it in the silence, wishing for a half second that Finch were still pacing outside, if only to offer some background noise to distract her from the almost instinctual panic she can't keep from rising in her even as she opens the package. Possibilities run rampant in her mind, of betrayal, of murder, of revenge for all the deaths V, and, she supposes, she, caused. Rather than a bomb, however, a red journal and a note fall into her lap. She scans the note first. It's a scant few lines, but the words almost stop her heart.</p><p>
  <em> 'This is who we thought V was. Yours to keep or confirm. Hope you're doing well. Finch.' </em>
</p><p>She considers the journal, presses a hand to it, as if she could feel if it was a part of the man she knew, holds it close to her heart, but doesn't open it.</p><p>The next time Finch paces outside the door, though, she lets him in.</p><p> </p><p>They develop an acquaintance-ship, of sorts. Evey makes them tea when he comes to visit her, every so often, asks him how he likes his eggs, and places a plate of sunny-side up in front of him, an egg-in-a-basket in front of herself. They talk. Carefully, at first. He dances around the subject of V, though it's clear to her that he's searching for an answer she can't give. She steers the subject in the opposite direction, pushes back, asks him about him and his job, after, and he gets quieter, only says things like <em> 'Dominic this,' </em> and <em> 'Dominic that.' </em> She asks him what's next, and he grimaces and falls silent, stabs his fork into the cooling yolk of his egg.</p><p>She waits as he lifts a piece to his mouth, chews, swallows. At last, he speaks.</p><p>"Isn't that your job?" he asks, and it's her turn to grimace.</p><p>"I'm not V," she replies quickly, and the words fall somewhere between a lie and the truth. Finch scoffs.</p><p>"That's not what you told me."</p><p>He stuffs another bite into his mouth as she glares.</p><p>"You can't ask us what's next," he continues. "Even if you didn't start this, isn't it the least you can do to see it through?"</p><p>"Aren't you V too?" she responds, waspish, but he ignores her in favor of finishing the rest of his egg, washing it all down with the dregs of his tea.</p><p>"We're doing the best we can," he says quietly after wiping the crumbs from his hands, "but you have to understand, people like me can't be V. Not like you can. We're not part of the protest, we're what you wanted torn down."</p><p> </p><p>After he leaves, she sits for a long, long while, until what passes for day bleeds into night, and her egg gets cold and hard. She thinks of V, before the end, and for the first time in what feels like a lifetime, doesn't cry, though she comes close. She remembers him, giving her a choice, and for the first time, wonders what it would take for her to shape the course of the country's future, a second time. She goes to the couch and turns on the TV, turns it to the channel that used to be BTN, and watches.</p><p>Despite the fifth of November, England is still as much in shambles as before. Protests have broken out across the country after London, where the local governments are less shaken by the loss of their leader, and crack down, hard. The military's been called in to some cities. Dublin burns. Shaky footage captures a crowd of V's pushing against a police barricade in Manchester. Guns go off. People scream. The video ends abruptly, and two reporters begin to talk, serious expressions on their faces. She changes the channel. There's more. Shouts and smoke and scuffling in Sheffield. In Birmingham, a V falls, lost to a sea of people.</p><p>She forces herself to keep her eyes on the screen, to take it all in with the knowledge that she caused this, she and V and the bombs, that this is the price of freedom, that this is the fight that's only just begun.</p><p>Finch's words ring through her head.</p><p>
  <em> 'Isn't it the least you can do to see it through?' </em>
</p><p> </p><p>The next morning, Evey buzzes her hair close to her scalp wherever it's started to curl again, brushes a hand over the bristly remains and tries to remind herself of the pain of being reborn. She sets out from the Shadow Gallery promising him, in her head, that she'll return when the work's done, when their dream of a better country, a better world becomes reality.</p><p>She hails a taxi, asks the driver to take her to danger, to freedom, and steps out of the car and into the first protest she can find, face bare, eyes blazing, one hand on her pepper spray, ready to take down anything and everything in her path. She yells herself hoarse, lets her voice mingle with hundreds, with thousands of others, and thinks, this is what strength feels like. Not her hand around the hilt of a knife, asking a man to beg for his life, but demanding something of her own, the people's own, becoming something bigger than herself and yet more <em>herself </em>than she'd ever been before. She wonders if this was what her parents once felt like, once dreamed of. She wonders if he ever once dreamed of this.</p><p>She shouts. She demands retribution. She demands her voice be heard.</p><p>They occupy the streets outside the mayor's mansion, press forward until only the gates and policemen stand in their way, their crowd a living thing, a breathing thing, a thing with wings and feet and a voice that cries, no more, we will take this no more, a cry that grows until the police can stop them no longer, until the gates are twisted bars of iron underfoot. The mayor flees. They settle in his house, throw makeshift barriers up around it, distribute food and medicine and bandages among the hurt and weary, and call it victory.</p><p> </p><p>In the sudden quiet, Evey slumps against a wall, her energy spent. She sees others she stood shoulder-to-shoulder with clump into groups, talking together, laughing, a day's work well done, but she can't bring herself to join one. She suddenly longs for the quiet of the Shadow Gallery, the gentle music from the jukebox of an era since past. In her pocket, she curls her fingers around Valerie's note, the only thing, along with the red notebook, she'd allowed herself to take with her. There's no going back, she tells herself. Not until I see this through.</p><p>A woman's voice startles her when she's about to doze off.</p><p>"What's your name?" She asks. "What's your story?"</p><p>Evey blinks up into the other woman's gentle eyes that flicker over her shaven head, her crossed, defensive arms, and settle back on her eyes. She forces herself to relax.</p><p>"I'm Evey," she says, and the smile that rises to her lips is small, but genuine.</p><p>"Evey," the other woman repeats, like an incantation. "V was one of my favorite letters, even before all this."</p><p>She smiles, soft, sad.</p><p>"It's nice to meet you. I'm Ruth."</p><p><em> 'There are no coincidences,' </em> V says in her mind, and Evey exhales, all at once, her heart suddenly in her mouth. Valerie's letter sits in her pocket, its edges well worn. She hadn't said what had happened to Ruth, after. Evey could probably recite every line by heart--</p><p>"Did you know a Valerie?" She asks before she can help herself, and she knows the answer even before Ruth nods slowly, pained.</p><p>"I betrayed her," she whispers, almost too quiet for Evey to hear. "They took me and burned me and hurt me and starved me, and I-- I gave them her name."</p><p>She looks past Evey, gaze fixed on the past, the choices that couldn't be undone.</p><p>"I wanted to die, after. I deserved it, or thought I did. But I survived somehow. Came to outside where they'd been keeping me, and crawled away. That's when I realized that no one would be happy if I stopped living except them, that it wouldn't change what I'd done to her, that nothing ever would, but the least I could do was stay alive and see it through. Tell our story, from start to finish."</p><p>Evey doesn't trust herself to speak. Instead, she draws Valerie's note from her pocket, presses it into Ruth's hand, closes her fingers around it.</p><p>"Take it," she manages. "It saved my life."</p><p>Ruth nods.</p><p> </p><p>The next morning, Ruth stands next to Evey, shoulder-to-shoulder, head held high.</p><p> </p><p>Weeks pass. The protests go on. Between breaths, between shouts, in a hoarse whisper as everyone around them slumbers on, Evey tells Ruth about V. It's almost as if a weight's been lifted from her shoulders, to be able to tell someone about the man she knew, the man she loved without them looking to prosecute him, to find fault and flaws, to pin him down. </p><p>"Everyone loved the idea," she says one night, sleeping bag curled close to Ruth's, "and ideas are more powerful than we could ever be. Ideas will survive us, be the death of us, and live a hundred years longer than us, until people speak no more."</p><p>"But I-" she says, and her voice catches, harsh and abrupt in the quiet. Ruth presses a hand to hers, and she swallows, goes on before tears steal what's left of her voice altogether. "I remember the man. I loved him. I'll always love him."</p><p> </p><p>Mornings later, they're back in London, at the foot of the remains of the Old Bailey. Where it all began, she thinks. Where they hope it'll end.</p><p>It does end, somehow. There is no bang, no explosion with fireworks arcing up into the shape of a V to cap it off, only their leader reading their agreed upon demands in a broadcast to the fractured government, to all of the United Kingdom, giving the people a voice, giving them power.</p><p>"That should be you," Ruth whispers, nudging an elbow into Evey's ribs, but she doesn't respond. She can only bring herself to stare, hollow-eyed, leaden-limbed, throughout the whole affair, and what follows, when the interim prime minister shakes hands with the protest leader, and declares England a democracy once more, announces an official election to be held in six months. The only thing that shakes her is the date of the election. November fifth. It hits her like a bullet to the chest, and she nearly staggers from the impact.</p><p><em> 'Is this what you wanted?' </em> she thinks. <em> 'Is this what we were fighting for?' </em></p><p> </p><p>Life without protesting unsettles her. She doesn't return to the Shadow Gallery. Not yet, she tells herself. Not until the election.</p><p>It's almost surreal how little society has changed, beyond the news channels, which now speak of hope, of a new future, of justice and good and democracy and an England to be proud of. She switches her TV off, wonders if this is what a new beginning is supposed to look like if all it feels like is another page turned in the same book, the title scratched out as if the reader could pretend everything and nothing had changed.</p><p>She tries her best to fill her time, forget the fire coiling in her gut when everyone around her seems satisfied, if not happy with the conclusion. She takes up the arts with a passion, painting, restoring, saving and creating. acting, as if slipping into another skin would make her forget what's hers. On the side, she learns martial arts, does her own stunts, gets used to the feel of a weapon in her hand, strapped to her waist, tucked under her pillow at night. Most nights, alone and in a room not the Shadow Gallery, she wakes up screaming. Only the gun's cool metal can calm her, her fingers curving around the trigger reminding her what's hers, the freedom she'd chosen, the life she now controls.</p><p>It scares her bedmates. The screams. The gun. The red notebook she keeps next to her pillow, cradles close to her heart when darkness creeps in and no one else is there. None of them last long.</p><p> </p><p>She writes to Ruth, who's returned to her hometown to find her parents. Some letters are long, cost her extra money to pay for postage. Some are short, a throwaway line or two, the letter itself more important, reassuring the other that they're alive, they're well, they're still winning the fight against their past, their demons.</p><p>She sees Finch on TV sometimes, before she turns it off. He stands off to the side as the interim prime minister speaks, his posture stiff, almost absurdly formal. She doesn't write to him. Some days she wonders if he still knocks on the door to the Shadow Gallery, paces ten minutes, then leaves. If he still thinks she should be V, in a country that doesn't seem to need V any longer.</p><p>She fries herself eggs-in-baskets. Fewer and fewer nights she wakes up screaming. She sits on her own couch and queues up the Count of Montecristo, and mouths along to every line. She tries not to cry. Perhaps it's not being V, but she likes to think it's better than surviving. It's living, almost. Picking up the remains of a life and making it her own. No one ever talks about it, but it's something hard, something cutting, she thinks, to have to get up, to keep going and do more than survive. There's a strength to it, a bitter, tenacious little thing that twists through her like shattered glass on bad days and keeps her standing through worse.</p><p> </p><p>Evey lives. The months of summer roll by in a blazing golden haze, a prelude to a new age, the newscasters call it. She scoffs, and turns off the TV, shares a look with Ruth, then goes back to her painting, a black and red thing twisting Adam Sutler's face into something evil as the man himself was. She wants to put copies of it up around the city before the election, a reminder to always remember. She'll sign it V.</p><p>Ruth writes a blog dedicated to Valerie, to remembering her and her love and her life and her unjust death and the deaths of many others. She tells the world to say their names, tell their stories. She tells the world to never forget.</p><p> </p><p>October comes, and the candidates are jokes, dangerous jokes, except for one woman whose voice is quieter than her opponents, but it carries, it has weight. In her speeches, she talks, and people listen. She tells the public about being prosecuted for being Asian and bi in the past, about how she was lucky her family was rich enough to keep it quiet, about how she loved two girls in silence and saw the second taken away, never to return, about how she saw the Old Bailey burn and decided to take action, about how she was one of the crowd who overtook the troops a year ago, in front of Parliament.</p><p>Evey watches every one of her speeches with Ruth. They go to a rally. For the first time, Evey feels a quiet hope blossom in her chest. <em> This </em> is what we fought for, she thinks, and squeezes Ruth's hand. <em> This </em> is what he died for.</p><p>On All Hallow's Eve, though, Evey turns on the TV to see that there's been an attempt on the candidate's life. Her blood runs cold, and the fire smouldering in her gut roars to life.</p><p>It's not over, she thinks. It's never over. </p><p> </p><p>She picks up a V mask for the first time in her life. It's not his-- his is gone like the rest of him, turned to ash and smoke with the House of Parliament, but when she puts it to her face, she feels as if part of him has come back to her. </p><p>She stalks the streets in it, spray paints red V's over propaganda, and wonders if there's a way to set the city ablaze again, spur them into action to protect the freedom that should be theirs. It would take a miracle, she thinks, another Parliament crashing to the ground in a shower of flames and rubble and fireworks. But she's not alone like he was. She has power, has strength, has had it since his first <em>'voíla,'</em> and all she has to do is be Evey, who's been alive, who's been struggling to keep her demons away, who has Ruth, who has a voice that she can and will use, with a little help from the V mask.</p><p>So she does.</p><p> </p><p>Ruth puts it on her blog, first. A call to action from V themself, she writes, a call to remember the last fifth of November, and what it took to come this far, to come out and <em> vote </em> and fight for your freedom, for your rights, for your lives.</p><p>On the eve of the fifth, Evey's surprised when people show up, some masked, some bare faced, all looking around as if they were waiting for some bomb to drop out of the sky, another building to explode, more chaos to break out. She takes a deep breath and steps out from the shadows, perches on what's left of the front step of Parliament in full V regalia.</p><p> </p><p>"I have come here tonight to keep a promise," she says, and it is Evey talking, Evey to the last, Evey seeing it to the end, Evey knowing no miracle will come to make things right, that they must seize this first step to freedom, that they must create something new with this to get even a little closer to the dream she has, that her parents had, that Gordon had, that V had. </p><p>"Tonight, our world will change, and we must choose what comes next. A return to the chains of others or lives of our own. A world of the past or one of the future. Let us choose carefully, London, and when we do, let us mark well and remember, remember this fifth of November!"</p><p>The clock strikes midnight.</p><p>The crowd explodes with cheers and applause.</p><p> </p><p>Evey smiles, touches a hand to the forehead of her mask, and thinks, this is what she'll fight for, what she <em> has </em> fought for. This is what he died for.</p><p>"V," she whispers, "Are you watching?"</p><p>There's still work to be done, she thinks. She can't return to the Shadow Gallery, not just yet.</p><p> </p><p>She strides through the noise of the crowd toward the light of tomorrow, the rise of a new sun, a new future.</p>
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